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Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Grr...

We have a busy two weeks ahead of us. One of our rental houses is vacant and we need to get it in shape to either rent or sell. That means painting, new carpet, new flooring in the kitchen, major cleaning, and a bunch of minor fixes.

I've found that if I do much physical labor, my incision sites get very sore. So I will not be the one doing most of the work. We will probably end up hiring someone to do the painting since it's very time-consuming as well as physically demanding. I hate to do that when normally I'd be perfectly capable of painting, but time is of the essence and there's just no way I'll be physically able to paint a whole house within the next two weeks.

The thing that actually bothers me about all this is that the tenant gave us less than a week's notice before she moved out, so now we're without that income. And laws in this state favor the tenant, so even if we took her to court and we won a judgment, we'd probably never get a penny out of her.

I think I'm going to write a letter to my state representative and state senator. After eight years of being a landlord, I know whereof I speak. The laws have got to change - landlords should not have to give out free rent to deadbeats with no legal recourse.